Mozart's Minuet in F major, K. 2 — one hundred and seventy-six notes and forty-seven seconds in total, written when he was six. It sits in the notebook his father Leopold kept for his sister Nannerl, and the hand on the page is Leopold's: the child played, the adult wrote it down. Both hands stay near middle C for most of it, the left walking one note at a time while the right says the tune. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
The player was six; the writing is his father's
In 1762 Leopold Mozart put together a notebook of graded little pieces for his eight-year-old daughter Maria Anna, known at home as Nannerl.
Some of what ended up in it was not copied from anywhere — it was played by her brother Wolfgang, four and a half years younger, and written down by their father one piece at a time, with a note of how old the boy was. This Minuet in F is one of them, from 1762, when Wolfgang was six.
So strictly speaking the manuscript of this piece is not in the composer's hand. A six-year-old cannot yet write music down; his father could. What we read today has passed through Leopold's pen.
It is also why the piece is this short. Twenty-four bars with the first eight repeated, and a complete minuet has happened — it is not a large work shrunk down, it is this size by design. The same notebook holds several more pieces from those years, numbered up to K. 5.
Under a minute, and nothing is missing
It opens in a very clear three: the right hand sings a phrase while the left steps one note at a time underneath, like someone walking through the figures of a dance with a hand held. There are only five or six notes a bar on average, so every one of them is audible, and so are the gaps between them.
When the first half ends you hear the same thing again — that is a repeat, not a new sentence. Second time round, listen to the left hand and notice it has been doing one thing all along.
The second half sets off somewhere else, the right-hand line flattening and dropping, before curving back to the opening shape to finish.
Nothing in this ambushes you: no loud passage, no fast runs, a range of only F2 to A5, and both hands near middle C nearly all the time. It works as a breath between longer pieces, and as a first thing to follow on the page.
Twenty-four bars, one repeat, and it is done
Twenty-four written bars with a repeat over the first eight, which opens out to thirty-two bars and one hundred and seventy-six sounding notes. There are no grace notes and no pedal marks; six dynamics and six hairpins in all.
The bar-by-bar count is almost flat — between three and ten notes from the first bar to the last, averaging five and a half. The density never shifts because the texture never does: melody in the right hand, single notes in the left.
Bars 1 to 8 are the first half and bars 9 to 16 are its repeat, so the same lines of the score come round once more on screen. The second half begins at bar 17 and runs twice as long, with the counts falling to three or four in the closing bars and settling on the lowest F.
The range is F2 to A5, a little over three octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.15 seconds.
A piece with few notes has nowhere to hide
First, the three has to stand still. The left hand plays roughly one note per beat throughout, and a beat out of place is audible at once — a piece with few notes gives you nowhere to hide.
Second, finish the right hand's sentences. Each is about four bars long, and the note at the end should not be dropped in a hurry; the commonest fault here is turning a phrase into a row of equal notes.
Third, change something on the repeat. Take it softer the second time, or shape one phrase differently; the score does not say so, but that is what minuets expect.
Fourth, leave the pedal alone. There is not one pedal mark in this score, the writing sits around middle C where it is already clear, and pedalling only smears it.
The tempo is 132 to the quarter. No metronome mark is printed in this source; another encoding of the same piece prints 132, and this recording follows it, running 43.6 seconds.
We rate this 1 out of 5.
There are more from the same notebook
Nannerl's notebook holds several more pieces from the same years, K. 1 to K. 5, comparable in length and difficulty. None has been made yet.
This channel has two other pieces that suit a first attempt at following a score: Bach's Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114, at one minute fifty and also in three, and Burgmüller's Arabesque, Op. 100 No. 2, under a minute and built on right-hand finger work. Heard together the three show how differently three periods imagined a piece for a beginner.
